by Will Durant
To more surely establish their domination, the priests depicted the gods as cruel, vindictive, implacable. They introduced ceremonies, initiations, mysteries, whose atrocity could nourish in men that somber melancholy so favorable to the empire of fanaticism. Then human blood flowed in great streams over the altars; the people, cowed with fear and stupefied with superstition, thought no price too high to pay for the good will of the gods. Mothers delivered without a tear their tender infants to the devouring flames; thousands of victims fell under the sacrificial knife. …
It was difficult for men so reverenced to remain long within the borders of subordination necessary to social order. The priesthood, drunk with power, often disputed the rights of the kings.… Fanaticism and superstition held the knife suspended over the heads of sovereigns; thrones were shaken whenever kings wished to repress or punish holy men, whose interests were confounded with those of the gods.… To wish to limit their power was to sap the foundations of religion.54
Generally the war on the old faith took the form of praising the new beliefs and methods of science and philosophy; to replace religion with science, and priests with philosophers, at least in the educated classes, was the dream of the philosophes. The sciences received lengthy expositions; for example, fifty-six columns were given to “Anatomy.” Under “Geology” there were long articles on minerals, metals, strata, fossils, glaciers, mines, earthquakes, volcanoes, and precious stones. Philosophy, in the new view, was to be based entirely on science; it would build no “systems,” it would shun metaphysics, it would not pontificate on the origin and destiny of the world. The article “École” made a frontal assault upon the Scholastic philosophers as men who had abandoned the search for knowledge, had surrendered to theology, and had lost themselves safely in logical cobwebs and metaphysical clouds.
Diderot contributed a remarkable series of articles on the history of philosophy; they leaned heavily on Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia critica Philosophiae (1742–44), but they showed original research in French thought. The essays on the Eleatics and Epicurus expounded materialism; other articles extolled Bruno and Hobbes. In Diderot philosophy became a religion. “Reason is for the philosopher what grace is for the Christian.”55 “Let us hasten to render philosophy popular,” he cried;56 and in the article “Encyclopedia” he wrote like an apostle: “Today, when philosophy advances with giant steps, when it submits to its empire all the objects of its interest, when its voice is the dominant voice, and it begins to break the yoke of authority and tradition, to hold to the laws of reason . . .” Here was the brave new faith, with a youthful confidence not often to be found again. Perhaps with an eye to his imperial protectress in Russia he added, like Plato: “Unite a ruler [Catherine II] with a philosopher of this kind [Diderot], and you will have a perfect sovereign.”57
If such a philosopher could replace the priest as guide-confessor to a king, he would counsel, first of all, a spread of freedom, especially to speech and press. “No man has received from nature the right of commanding others”;58 so much for the divine right of kings. And as for revolution:
Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.… If these in turn become stronger and shake off their yoke, they do so with as much right and justice as did the former who had imposed it upon them. The same law that made the authority unmakes it; it is the law of the stronger.… Therefore true and legitimate power necessarily has limits.… The prince holds from his subjects themselves the authority that he has over them; and this authority is limited by the laws of nature and of the state.… It is not the state which belongs to the prince, but rather the prince who belongs to the state.59
The Encyclopédie was not socialistic, nor democratic; it accepted monarchy, and rejected that notion of equality which Rousseau expounded so forcefully in 1755. Jaucourt’s article “Natural Equality” advocated equality before the law, but added: “I know too well the necessity of different conditions, grades, honors, distinctions, prerogatives, subordinations, which must rule under all governments.”60 Diderot at this time considered private property the indispensable basis of civilization.61 The article “Man,” however, had a communistic moment: “The net profit of a society, if equally distributed, may be preferable to a larger profit if this is distributed unequally and has the effect of dividing the people into classes.” And—talking of almshouses—“it would be of far more value to work for the prevention of misery than to multiply places of refuge for the miserable.”62
A philosophical king would periodically examine the title deeds to feudal domains, and would abolish feudal privileges no longer merited by seignorial services to the peasantry or the state.63 He would find a humane substitute for the forced labor of the corvée, and he would forbid the trade in slaves. He would, so far as his power extended, put an end to wars of dynastic rivalry or greed. He would seek to cleanse the trial courts of corruption, to end the sale of offices, and to mitigate the ferocity of the penal code; at the very least he would put an end to judicial torture. And instead of lending his aid to the perpetuation of superstition he would dedicate his labors to advancing that golden age in which statesmanship would ally itself with science in an unremitting war upon ignorance, illness, and poverty.
By and large the economic ideas of the Encyclopédie were those of the middle class to which most of the philosophes belonged. Often they were the views of the physiocrats who, under the lead of Quesnay and Mirabeau pére, dominated economic theory in midcentury France. Free enterprise—and therefore free commerce and free competition—were held vital to free men; hence guilds, as impediments to all these, were condemned. These ideas were destined to take the stage of history in the ministry of Turgot (1774).
The Encyclopédie gave alert and enthusiastic attention to the industrial technology that was beginning to transform the economic face of England and France. The mechanical arts, Diderot maintained, should be honored as the application of science, and surely the application is as precious as the theory. “What absurdity in our judgments! We exhort men to occupy themselves usefully, and we despise useful men.”64 He hoped to make the Encyclopédie a treasury of technology so thorough that if the mechanical arts were by some tragedy destroyed they could be rebuilt from one surviving set of its volumes. He himself wrote long and painstaking articles on steel, agriculture, needles, bronze, the boring machine (“Alésoir”), shirts, stockings, shoes, bread. He admired the genius of inventors and the skills of artisans; he went in person, or sent his agents, to farms, shops, and factories to study new processes and products; and he supervised the engravings, numbering almost a thousand, that made the eleven volumes of plates the marvel of their kind in their age; to those volumes the government was proud to extend the approbation et privilege du roi. Here were fifty-five plates on the textile industry, eleven on minting, ten on military technics, five on making gunpowder, three on the manufacture of pins; the last were a source for Adam Smith’s famous passage on the division of labor into “eighteen distinct operations” in producing a pin.65 To get this knowledge, said Diderot,
we turned to the ablest artisans in Paris and throughout the kingdom. We took the trouble … to ask them questions, to write at their dictation, … to get from them the terms used in their trades, … to rectify, in long and frequent interviews with one group of workmen, what others had imperfectly, obscurely, or sometimes inaccurately explained.… We have sent engravers into the shops, who have drawn designs of the machines and tools, omitting nothing that could make them clear to the eyes.’66
When, in 1773, the Ottoman Sultan asked Baron de Tott to manufacture cannon for the forts of the Dardanelles, the Baron used the Encyclopédie article on cannon as one of his constant guides.67
After his work on the text was completed, Diderot suffered a mortification that almost broke his spirit. Happening to examine an article, he discovered that many parts of the proofsheets that he had corrected and a
pproved had been omitted in print. A survey of other articles showed a similar bowdlerization in Volumes IX to XVII. The omissions were usually of passages that might have further aroused the clergy or the Parlement; and the deletions had been made with no regard for the logic or continuity of what remained. Le Breton confessed that he had performed the surgery to save the Encyclopédie from further tribulation, and himself from bankruptcy. Grimm reported the results:
The discovery threw Diderot into a frenzy which I shall never forget. “For years,” he cried to Le Breton, “you have been basely cheating me. You have massacred … the work of twenty good men who have devoted their time, their talents, their vigils, from love of right and truth, in the simple hope of seeing their ideas given to the public, and reaping from them a little consideration richly earned.… You will henceforth be cited as a man who has been guilty of an act of treachery, an act of vile hardihood, to which nothing that has ever happened in this world can be compared.” 68
He never forgave Le Breton.
Looking back upon the great enterprise, we see it to have been, by its history as well as its contents, the outstanding achievement of the French Enlightenment. And as Diderot’s part in it was central and indispensable, his stature rises to a place only after Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s in the intellectual panorama of eighteenth-century France. His industry as editor was pervasive and exhausting. He made the cross references, corrected errors, read the proofs. He ran about Paris seeking and prodding contributors. He himself wrote hundreds of articles when contributors could not be found or when they proved incompetent. He was the last resort when all others had failed. So we find him writing on philosophy, canvas, Christianity, boa constrictors, beauty, playing cards, breweries, and consecrated bread. His article “Intolerance” anticipated Voltaire’s treatise, and may have suggested several of its ideas. Many of his pieces were studded with errors, and some of them were indiscriminately hostile and unjust, like that on the Jesuits. But he was a man in a hurry, embattled and pursued, and fighting back with every weapon he could find.
Now that the excitement of battle has subsided, we can recognize the shortcomings of the Encyclopédie There were a thousand errors of fact. There were careless repetitions and flagrant omissions. There were substantial plagiarisms, as Jesuit scholars pointed out; some articles were “a mosaic of borrowings.”69 Berthier, in three issues of the Journal de Trévoux, showed, with exact references and parallel quotations, over a hundred plagiarisms in Volume I. Most of these thefts were brief and unimportant, as in definitions, but several extended to three or four columns copied almost word for word.
There were serious intellectual defects in the Encyclopédie. The contributors had too simple a view of human nature, too sanguine an estimate of the honesty of reason, too vague an understanding of its frailty, too optimistic a prospect of how men would use the knowledge that science was giving them. The philosophes in general, and Diderot in particular, lacked historical sense; they seldom paused to inquire how the beliefs they combated had arisen, and what human needs, rather than priestly inventions, had given them birth and permanence. They were quite blind to the immense contribution of religion to social order, to moral character, to music and art, to the mitigation of poverty and suffering. Their anti- religious bias was so strong that they could never lay claim to that impartiality which we should now consider essential to a good encyclopedia. Though some Jesuits, like Berthier, were often fair in their criticism, most of the Encyclopédie’s critics were as partial as the philosophes.
Diderot felt keenly the factual faults of the work. He wrote in 1755: “The first edition of an encyclopedia cannot but be a very ill-formed and incomplete compilation”;70 and he expected that it would soon be superseded. Even so the bulky product found its way into the centers of thought on the Continent. The twenty-eight volumes were thrice reprinted in Switzerland, twice in Italy, once in Germany, once in Russia. Pirated editions came back into France to spread the influence of the contraband ideas. All in all, there were forty-three editions in twenty-five years—a remarkable record for so costly a set. Families read its articles together in the evening; eager groups were formed to study it; Thomas Jefferson advised James Madison to buy it. Now the gospel of reason as against mythology, of knowledge as against dogma, of progress through education as against the resigned contemplation of death, all passed like a pollen-laden wind over Europe, disturbing every tradition, stimulating thought, at last fomenting revolt. The Encyclopédie was the revolution before the Revolution.
* * *
I. According to his friends Saunderson died a pious death. The Royal Society of London resented Diderot’s ascription of atheism to one of its members; and it never admitted him to corresponding membership.
II. The pleasant story that Mme. de Pompadour induced Louis XV to withdraw his opposition to the publication of Volumes VIII-XVII by showing him the article on gunpowder is now generally rejected as a fancy of Voltaire’s.53 The story is given in Vol. XLVIII of Beuchot’s edition of Voltaire’s works, and also in the Goncourts’ Madame de Pompadour, p. 147.
CHAPTER XX
Diderot Proteus
1758–73
I. THE PANTHEIST
WE call him Proteus because, like the sea god in Homer, he “tried to escape his captors by assuming all sorts of shapes.”1 Voltaire called him Pantophilus because Diderot was in love with every branch of science, literature, philosophy, and art. In each of these fields he had intimate knowledge; to each he made suggestive contributions. Ideas were his meat and drink. He gathered them, savored and sampled them, and poured them out in a profuse chaos whenever he found a blank sheet or a willing ear. “I throw my ideas upon paper, and they become what they may”2—perhaps foes. He never co-ordinated them, never bothered with consistency; we can quote him in almost any direction, but his composite direction was unmistakable. He was more original than Voltaire, perhaps because he had never accepted classic norms, and could let himself go without well-bred restraints. He followed every theory wherever it led him, sometimes to its depths, sometimes to its dregs. He saw every point of view except those of the priest and the saint, because he had no certainties.
As for me, I concern myself more with forming than with dissipating clouds, with suspending judgment rather than with judging.… I do not decide, I ask questions.3 … I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to follow any idea, wise or mad, that may come uppermost; I chase it as do young libertines on the track of a courtesan whose face is windblown and smiling, whose eyes sparkle, and whose nose turns up.… My ideas are my trollops.4
Diderot had an intellectual imagination; he visioned ideas, philosophies, personalities, as others vision forms and scenes. Who else in his time could have conceived the scandalous, unmoral, shiftless, fascinating “nephew of Rameau”? After creating a character, he let it develop as of its own accord; he let it lead him on as if the character were the author, and the author the puppet. He imagined himself in the place of a young unwilling nun, and made her so real that skeptical Frenchmen worried over her woes. He experimented mentally with ideas, entertained them for a time, imagined their consequences in logic or action, then tossed them aside. There was hardly an idea of that time that did not enter his head. He was not only and literally a walking encyclopedia, he was a moving laboratory, and his ideas wandered with his feet.
So in Penées sur l’interprétation de la nature, which he published in 1754—anonymously, but with permission tacite from the benevolent Malesherbes—he played with ideas of monism, materialism, mechanism, vitalism, and evolution. Still under Bacon’s spell, he took from him the title, the aphoristic form, and the summons to scientists to labor in concert for the conquest of nature through experiment and reason. He was inspired, too, by Maupertuis’ Système universel de la nature (1751), and Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749 f.); he agreed with Maupertuis that all matter might be alive, and with Buffon that biology was now ready to speak to philosophy. He welcomed in both authors t
he emerging hypothesis of evolution.
He began with a proud design: “It is nature that I wish to describe [écrire]; nature is the only book for the philosopher.”5 He conceived of nature as a half-blind, half-intelligent power operating upon matter, making matter live, making life take a million experimental forms, improving this organ, discarding that one, giving birth and death creatively. In that cosmic laboratory thousands of species have appeared and disappeared.
Just as in the animal and plant kingdoms an individual begins, … grows, endures, perishes, and passes away, could it not be likewise with entire species? If faith did not teach us that animals come from the hands of the Creator such as we see them, and if it were allowed to have the least doubt of their commencement and their end, might not the philosopher, abandoned to his conjectures, suppose that animality had from all eternity its particular elements, scattered and confounded in the mass of matter; that these elements happened to unite, since it was possible for this to happen; that the embryo formed from these elements passed through an infinity of organizations and developments; that it acquired in succession movement, sensation, ideas, thought, reflection, consciousness, feelings, passions, signs, gestures, articulate sounds, language, laws, sciences, and arts; that millions of years passed between these developments; that perhaps it [the organism] has still further developments to undergo, other additions to receive, now unknown to us; … that it may lose these faculties as it acquired them; that it may forever disappear from nature, or, rather, continue to exist under a form, and with faculties, quite other than those which we notice in it in this moment of time?6
